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How Google Glass will usher in an era of superhuman vision

November 1, 2013

Terminator augmented-reality display (Credit: Orion Pictures)

Stanford professor Marc Levoy sees a combination of computational imaging and new-form-factor camera-equipped devices that will allow for a set of what he described as “superhero vision” capabilities, Extreme Tech reports.

Rapidly increasing processor power will help fuel this new world of powerful new photographic tools. Levoy, a pioneer in both computer graphics and computational imaging, noted that GPU power is growing by roughly 80% per year, while megapixels are only growing by about 20%.

That means more horsepower to process each pixel — with the available cycles increasing each year. Coupled with near-real-time multi-frame image capture, the bounds of traditional photography can even be stretched beyond the borders of a single image:

By combining long exposures with shorter ones, high-dynamic-range (HDR) scenes can be captured, providing virtual-reality or head-up assistance to the wearer by seei;ng into the shadows or even in largely dark rooms.

Removing objects from photographs by using bits of multiple frames in real time, taking advantage of the combination of high native frame rate and increased computational power (powerful GPUs), perhaps even as a form of augmented reality vision.

Comments (6)

How about object(s) tracking in a crowded room or a mall or parking lot. Forgot where you left your car? No problem. Want to keep track of sixteen different people during party time accross 36 different party suites on five floors of the hotel at a conference. No problem. (Oh, darn, where did Brin go now? Can you say “transparency?”) Find the color of that car annoying? Screen out the particular annoying yellow from a flower garden – and replace it with purple? Warn of incoming? Project where a punch will land and where exactly you should block? Auto-blocking of glare? Auto-pointing to objects of known or projected interest? Sound selection – only hear the sounds you want to, while the others are cancelled, not by frequency but by location, either in real space or via bluetooth realtime local conferencing. Hear clearly only the people in a particular conversation scattered around a table or room, regardless of background music and talk.

“Augmenting video clips to amplify motion — making moving objects much easier to isolate and identify (like measuring a person’s pulse with a simple camera).” Actually, you can do this without any added tech if you train yourself to hold your eyes absolutely steady. Everything not moving will go to black, a useful trick if you’re a jungle animal.

REPLAY: There’s a world of enhancement that can be done when you can play back everything you see or hear, such as multithreading the conversation app I discussed above so that all the audible, blue-toothed or hyperlinked conversations in a specified area are separated and recorded as threads that you can auto or manually index and caption.

Sensory reduction: Around 1992, I picked up a crude image capture system that ran on a home model Amiga 500. It had the option of single frame capture and display at about one frame per second, in greyscale. So I tuned my VCR to the daily news and ran that into the system input. Immediately I was aware as never before of a host of details and dimensions, such as camera angles and why they were chosen, that I had never noticed before.

The reason? Sensory overload. A full-color full-motion video image from a prime-time TV show typically maxes out the human processing system to the point that we unconsciously reduce the bandwidth to bring the input into recognizable form. A lot of dimensions of the experience are simply dropped. Severely constraining the input – going from 30fps to 1fps and 16-level gray from full color means resources suddenly coming available to notice aspects that were there all along. So, the new systems should be able to abstract essentials and reduce sensory bandwidth as needed.

He’s right. Many people skip such possibilities that are slowly appearing. Advances in electronics allow us to broaden our input/output in ways that many people find suprising.
One thing I will pick on is that mobile(that can be used in smartphones, photo cameras etc) GPU computational power grows more than 80% per year(at least 200% in 2012-13).